“He makes her eyes all gooey and her voice go giggly,” he sighed, hitching Dani over his shoulder fireman style and carrying her to the big granite-colored couch. “And he makes her salmon however she wants. And then he does the dishes.”

Dani smacked his ass for treating her like a moving box, though she thoroughly enjoyed the novelty of a man who could pick her up like she was made of dandelion fluff. “Are you telling me or reminding yourself?”

Zed gently dropped her on the couch, so she could lean her head back on the arm rest. “A little of both.”

He flopped onto the opposite side of the couch and toed off his boots and socks. He took her bare foot in hand and pressed his thumbs into the ball of her foot. She made a noise that was positively indecent.

“Ooh,” he said, pressing that spot again. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

“If you keep that up, I’ll never leave,” she promised.

“All part of my plan, darlin.’”

She snickered and took his left foot into her hands, to return the foot rub favor. It was weird that for a guy who frequently ran around barefoot and occasionally sported four-inch talons on his paws, he had absolutely beautiful feet. They were long and narrow with a high arch and perfect little square nails. And he clearly knew about pumice stones, because his heels were soft as a baby’s butt.

Except.

Dani lifted Zed’s foot, so it was closer to her face. “Is that a birthmark?”

She squinted at the small dark mark on the sole of his foot, just below his big toe. It looked like a Nordic rune, though definitely not one that she’d seen before, written in dark blue ink. It looked like an hourglass that had been squished and filled with tiny triangles. “Do you have a tattoo on the bottom of your foot?”

Zed bit his lip. “Yeah, that was something I was going to show you eventually. Probably after we’d both recovered from the shock of moving in together.”

“To show me how well you can withstand a crazy amount of pain?”

Zed laughed. “No, it’s a bear-shifter thing, abeille. That is my secret tattoo.”

“Meaning your mom has never seen it?”

Zed snorted. “No, meaning, my uncle is the only one who has ever seen it. It’s the family sigil. He inked it himself after I was officially judged a man.”

“I’m guessing you had a full beard when you were ten,” she said.

Zed nodded. “I had a respectable amount of peach fuzz. Normally, a boy’s father would ink the sigil on his foot, but my own daddy had passed on.”

“So how is this tattoo different from the many other tattoos you have?”